Law, Tech and Policy

The Trouble with the TPP – Canadian law professor, Michael Geist, is blogging every weekday until February 4th on what he believes are the significant problems with the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The link is to his first daily post in the series

“When a law has a name like ‘Patriot’ or ‘Freedom,’ it’s a sign that you should read the fine print. Somewhere down there, in the terraced subclauses of some forgettable subsection, is a word with a special meaning, a word that offers shelter and concealment to whatever it is that the law actually does.”

General Interest

The Fallen of WWII – a captivating visualization (I watched the video (18 minutes); there is also an interactive version) of WWII casualties, including in relation to post-WWII conflicts. Highly recommended.

Recommended Video: Vinod Khosla @ The Stanford Graduate School of Business: “Failure Does Not Matter – Success Matters.” As is readily apparent from the video, Khosla has a very healthy ego, for the most part earned. There are various versions of this talk on the web, but this recent appearance at Stanford GSB is one of the better. The key portion is from the beginning to 35:30 (when the audience questions begin).

On the 35th anniversary of the case which introduced the 3rd party doctrine (i.e., people have no expectation of privacy in information they expose to others (e.g., telcos and other businesses)): Smith v. Maryland Turns 35, But Its Health Is Declining — Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“A legal regime in which U.S. citizens’ data receives different levels of privacy and oversight, depending on whether it is collected inside or outside U.S. borders, may have made sense when most communications by U.S. persons stayed inside the United States. But today, U.S. communications increasingly travel across U.S. borders — or are stored beyond them. For example, the Google and Yahoo e-mail systems rely on networks of ‘mirror’ servers located throughout the world. An e-mail from New York to New Jersey is likely to wind up on servers in Brazil, Japan and Britain. The same is true for most purely domestic communications. Executive Order 12333 contains nothing to prevent the NSA from collecting and storing all such communications — content as well as metadata — provided that such collection occurs outside the United States in the course of a lawful foreign intelligence investigation. No warrant or court approval is required, and such collection never need be reported to Congress. None of the reforms that Obama announced earlier this year will affect such collection. Without any legal barriers to such collection, U.S. persons must increasingly rely on the affected companies to implement security measures to keep their communications private. The executive order does not require the NSA to notify or obtain consent of a company before collecting its users’ data.”

”Computer users pass around USB sticks like silicon business cards. Although we know they often carry malware infections, we depend on antivirus scans and the occasional reformatting to keep our thumbdrives from becoming the carrier for the next digital epidemic. But the security problems with USB devices run deeper than you think: Their risk isn’t just in what they carry, it’s built into the core of how they work. That’s the takeaway from findings security researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell plan to present next week, demonstrating a collection of proof-of-concept malicious software that highlights how the security of USB devices has long been fundamentally broken.”

General Interest

“On June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m., Sharon Buchanan used a barcode to ring up a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. A tectonic shift in the underlying economics of trade in tangible, physical goods of all kinds soon followed. “